The Hall of Fame

Peter Charles Archibald Ewart Jennings (July 29, 1938 – August 7, 2005) was the lead news anchor for the ABC network from the 1980s to the 2000s. He had anchored ABC World News Tonight since 1978 and was the sole anchor from 1983 through April 2005. Jennings died of lung cancer on August 7, 2005 at the age of 67.

Early life

Born in Toronto, Ontario, Canada, Jennings was the son of Charles Jennings, the first news anchor and head of the news department at the CBC. After the family moved to Ottawa, Ontario, Peter grew up there and attended Lisgar Collegiate Institute. He also attended Trinity College School in Port Hope Ontario. Although a member of the class of '57, Peter left in 1955 to pursue broadcasting. Jennings also attended Carleton University, University of Ottawa, and Rider College in New Jersey. He never graduated from high school or college.

He got his start in broadcasting at the age of nine, hosting a weekly half-hour CBC Radio kids' show called Peter's People. In his late teens and early twenties, he appeared in a number of amateur musical theatre productions with the Orpheus Musical Theatre Society, including Damn Yankees and South Pacific. He later hosted a local television program called Club Thirteen, similar to American Bandstand. He also worked as a Royal Bank of Canada teller before his journalist days. At the age of 23, he was hired by a Brockville, Ontario radio station. After his coverage of a local train wreck was picked up by the CBC, Canada's first private TV network CTV (a competitor of his father's network) hired Jennings to co-anchor its late-night national news. He was assigned to cover civil rights activities, where he was quickly noticed by American network ABC and in 1964 was hired away as a correspondent. Barely a year later, he was given several high-profile reporting opportunities for what was then a 15-minute news broadcast on ABC Evening News.

Anchor career

In 1961, Jennings became one of the original coanchors of CTV National News. The program had varying anchor teams in its first years, although Jennings was the sole constant. He was with the program until 1964.

His first stint as ABC's anchor took place in 1965 on the appropriately named Peter Jennings with the News. At 26, he was and is the youngest ever American network news anchor. He could not compete with older anchors of other networks such as Walter Cronkite, Chet Huntley and David Brinkley. His Canadian English accent, grammar, and diction and mistakes from inexperience with American topics led to his being replaced in 1968, and derided by critics as "glamourcaster" or "anchorboy." Despite he used some profanity on the CBC program broadcast in 1965, while he was anchor of the then 15-minute "ABC Evening News".

Determined to rebuild his career, Jennings stayed with ABC as a foreign correspondent. He reported from the Middle East during the Yom Kippur War and the Lebanese civil war, putting him into contact with world leaders and granting him intimate knowledge of important regions. Jennings's expertise served him well, as he received notice as the ABC reporter on-scene during the Munich Olympics massacre.

Beginning in 1978, Jennings was part of a three-anchor team on "World News Tonight," with Frank Reynolds in Washington, Max Robinson from Chicago, and Jennings from London. A year later, he married his third wife, author Kati Marton, with whom he had two children, Elizabeth and Christopher.

After Reynolds' unexpected death in 1983, ABC News President Roone Arledge first chose Tom Brokaw, NBC's White House Correspondent, to take the top job as main news anchor. Brokaw turned down the offer and took over as sole anchor on the NBC Nightly News. Jennings was then selected, starting on August 9, 1983, and became a very influential TV personality. On December 31, 1999, 175 million people tuned into at least a portion of his network's Millennium Eve special "ABC 2000," also known as "ABC 2000 Today."

For more than two decades, Jennings was a visible fixture in many American homes every night. Along with the two other pillars of the so-called "Big Three"—Tom Brokaw of NBC and Dan Rather of CBS—Jennings had, in the early 1980s, ushered in the era of the TV news anchor as lavishly compensated, globe-trotting superstar. The magnitude of a news event could be measured by whether Jennings and his counterparts on the other two networks showed up on the scene. Jennings led the rating race for a decade beginning in 1986, and had been a close second in the ratings behind Tom Brokaw and Brokaw's successor Brian Williams since then. Brokaw's retirement in December 2004, followed by Rather's forced resignation from the evening news in March 2005, and finally Jennings's death, brought that era to a close.

Jennings was a frequent target of charges of "liberal bias" by certain conservative groups, such as the Media Research Center.[1] Supporters of Jennings contended that most critical reports of him consisted of inaccuracies or out-of-context quotes. He was nonetheless frozen out of the Bush White House, and George W. Bush was the first President in recent memory who did not sit down for an interview with Jennings. It did not help that ABC was branded the "least patriotic" of the big three networks in the aftermath of 9/11 because of Bill Maher's politically incorrect comments and because ABC did not have its anchors wear pins of US flags.

During his career, Jennings had reported from every major world capital and war zone, and from all 50 U.S. states, according to the network. According to his official ABC biography, he was "in Berlin in the 1960s when the Berlin Wall was going up," and there again "in the late 1980s when it came down." He seemed to draw on that collective experience—as well as his practiced ability to calmly describe events as they unfolded live—not long after two hijacked planes struck the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001. Over the course of that day, and those that immediately followed, he would spend more than 60 hours on the air in what Tom Shales of The Washington Post praised as a tour de force of interviewing and explanatory broadcast journalism laced with undisguised bewilderment.

Jennings would have obviously insisted on covering any world news story, so when absent in Rome, Italy for the death of Pope John Paul II and unable to journey to Asia to report on the aftermath of the tsunami, it was very much taken to notice.

Leaving the chair

On April 1, 2005, Jennings anchored "World News Tonight" for the last time. On April 5, 2005, Jennings informed viewers through a taped message that he was diagnosed with lung cancer, and was starting chemotherapy treatment the following week. (according to his sister Sarah, Jennings reportedly started smoking when he was 11 years old but quit in 1988, then briefly resumed following the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks.) Though he said he would continue to host World News Tonight when possible, April 5 would prove to be his final broadcast. ABC News' Charles Gibson, co-host of the network's Good Morning America program, and Elizabeth Vargas, co-host of the network's 20/20, served as temporary anchors until his death.

Jennings died after his bout with lung cancer in his New York City home on the evening of Sunday, August 7, 2005, about 4 months after his farewell message was aired. Married four times, he is survived by his wife, producer Kayce Freed, and his two children, Elizabeth and Christopher (who were from his third marriage, to journalist Kati Marton). He had also been married to Valerie Godsoe, followed by Annie Malouf. Charles Gibson announced Jennings' death at 11:41 PM (Eastern Time) on August 7, 2005, with an ABC News special report that included the reading his life story. Barbara Walters gave her comments during this, as did fellow ABC anchors Diane Sawyer and Ted Koppel. Later on during the day, former NBC News anchor Tom Brokaw and former CBS News anchor Dan Rather spoke fondly of him. ABC started running in memoriam showings that said "The American Broadcasting Company and ABC News mourn the death of Peter Jennings, Anchor, Journalist, Leader, Friend." ABC News also ran a two-hour special consisting of interviews with colleagues and friends and clips from his reports on the evening of August 10, 2005.

Soon after he died his wife, Kayce Freed, issued this statement: " Peter died with his family around him, without pain and in peace. He knew he'd lived a good life."

Canadian citizen

Jennings was a dual citizen of Canada and the United States, having become an American citizen on May 30, 2003. He was said to have been very proud of scoring 100 of 100 on the U.S. citizenship exam. Even though Jennings became a dual citizen, he was still a proud Canadian, and would often retire in the summer to Wakefield, Quebec near his native Ottawa. He was given the key to the city by former mayor Jim Watson. Jennings donated a sculpture to the city's By Ward Market and was often seen there during the summers.

Jennings did cover events north of the border that were ignored by other US networks, such as when he brought up Canadian examples during intense policy debates in Congress. Most notable was his coverage of the 1995 Quebec referendum where Jennings went to great lengths to explain why it was important to Americans.

In an interview on CBC's The National the evening after Jenning's passing, friend and rival former CBS anchor Dan Rather noted in a tribute that Jennings' Canadian upbringing allowed him to get a different perspective of events both inside and outside the US. That same day, the big three Canadian anchors, Peter Mansbridge at the CBC, Lloyd Robertson at CTV, and Kevin Newman, himself a former ABC correspondent at Global also gave their thoughts about Jennings and his Canadian roots. On CTV, Robertson talked about it in an interview on its morning news show, Canada AM. Global National opened its broadcast with news of Jennings's death and closed it with Newman's thoughts on a mentor and a friend, which he recalled on a blog.

Public response to his death

Jennings Effect: Many people have quit smoking following Peter Jennings' death from lung cancer.

Awards

• Edward R. Murrow Lifetime Achievement Award from Washington State University, 2004

• Sol Taishoff Award for Excellence in Broadcast from the National Press Foundation, 2000

• 14 National Emmys

• 2 George Peabody Awards

• Several Overseas Press Club Awards

• Several Alfred du Pont Columbia University Awards for Journalism

• Harvard University's Goldsmith Career Award for Excellence in Journalism

• Radio and Television News Directors Paul White Award (award chosen by the news directors of all three major networks)

• National Headliner Award, 1970

• Named by the Washington Journalism Review anchor of the year three straight years.

• Fred Friendly First Amendment Award from Quinnipiac University, 2001

Trivia

• Jennings was the youngest anchor ever of an American prime time network news program, at 26.

• Jennings was parodied in Team America: World Police.

• In 1999, he anchored the 12-hour ABC series, The Century, and ABC's series for the History Channel, America's Time.

• Jennings relayed a report from memory after a correspondent's taped report broke during broadcast.

• Jennings was a certificated (fully qualified) private pilot.

• Jennings logged 25 hours on air for the millennial new year, December 31, 1999 – January 1, 2000.

• Jennings logged more than 60 hours on the air during the week of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, including 12 hours straight on the 11th.

• Jennings visited the stadium of the Portland Sea Dogs minor league baseball team in 1996. He stayed there for a week and took batting practice several times with the Sea Dogs, wearing a full Sea Dogs uniform.